Microsoft just released the System Center Operations Manager Management Pack for Windows Server Storage Spaces 2012 R2 to the public. This allows you to monitor your Storage Spaces deployments with Operations Manager.

Monitoring Scenarios

This Management Pack contains rules to monitor physical disk and enclosure state in storage spaces.
Health is calculated by the storage service and is passed to Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) using the Storage Management API (SM-API), and is in turn passed to Operations Manager (OM) through the OM connector for VMM.

Supported Configurations

This management pack requires System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 or later. A dedicated Operations Manager management group is not required.

The following table details the supported configurations for the Management Pack for Storage Spaces:

I know this is nothing new but since I had to mention the Whitepaper on NIC Teaming and the use of SMB Multichannel as well as the configuration with System Center Virtual Machine Manager in a couple of meetings I want to make sure you have an overview on my blog.

NIC Teaming

Windows Server NIC Teaming was introduced in Windows Server 2012 (Codename Windows Server 8). NIC teaming, also known as Load Balancing/Failover (LBFO), allows multiple network adapters to be placed into a team for the purposes of bandwidth aggregation, and/or traffic failover to maintain connectivity in the event of a network component failure.

NIC Teaming Recommendation

For design the default and recommended configuration is using NIC Teaming with Switch Independent and Dynamic and in some scenarios where you have the write switches you can use LACP and Dynamic.

Microsoft just released System Center 2012 R2 Update Rollup 5, which includes a lot of new features and fixes. The update also brings support for SQL Server 2014 as a database server for most of the System Center 2012 R2 components. There will be support for the rest of the System Center components in the Update Rollup 6.

Yesterday Microsoft released a new Update Rollup for System Center 2012 R2 and Azure Pack called Update Rollup 5. Update Rollup 5 has a lot of fixes and new features especially for Windows Azure Pack and System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Data Protection Manager.

Fix to the Attached Network dialog box where the network entries in the list were disabled.

As you can see you get several new feature with Update Rollup 5. In Data Protection Manager you finally get support for SharePoint, Exchange and Windows Client workload protection to Microsoft Azure, and support for workloads running on VMware infrastructure. Virtual Machines Manager not only brings new features such as support for the Virtual Machine Manager Database to run on SQL Server 2014 it also includes a lot of fixes and a security update (3035898
MS15-017: Vulnerability in Virtual Machine Manager could allow elevation of privilege: February 10, 2015). Some of the most interesting fixes for me are:

DHCP extension: Currently, users have to manually update the DHCP extension after update rollup installation on all hosts. This is now automated. After the DHCP extension is replaced in the Virtual Machine Manager server’s installation folder to the latest version, Virtual Machine Manager automatically checks the DHCP extension against all hosts. If the host has an older version of DHCP extensions, the agent version status will be displayed as “DHCP extension needs to be updated in host properties on the Status page.” The user calls the update agent and updates the DHCP extension on the Hyper-V host in the same way that the user did this for the Virtual Machine Manager agent. Also, if the VSwitch is a logical switch, the status will be shown in “logical switch compliance.” The user can remediate the logical switch. This will also update the DHCP extension on the host.

Bare-Metal Deployment: If a physical computer profile is created by using vNic (and by using a virtual machine network) and if there are more than one hostgroup for a logical network that also has that virtual machine network when you add a host resource on the “Provisioning Options” page, the host profile will be displayed for only one host group. The profile won’t be displayed for the rest of the host groups.

For Windows Azure Pack also includes some important fixes and improvements on of the is in the Tenant Portal, users can now see details on Virtual Machine Memory type, Memory Startup and Maximum values.

Update Rollup 5 for System Center 2012 R2 brings a lot of new features and important fixes to the table, however before deploying the fixes in your production environment, I recommend to test the Update Rollup and maybe wait for some reports about issues from other users.

Especially Virtual Machines Manager includes a lot of fixes and DPM also brings beside fixes some interesting new features such as support for SQL Server 2014. In Azure Pack Microsoft added now the possibility to use Azure Site Recovery Manager into plans for DC Failovers via Hyper-V Replica.

After System Center Universe Europe 2014 and E2EVC Brussels, I am proud to announce that I am also speaking at the new Midwest Management Summit (MMS). The Midwest Management Summit is a 3-day conference purposely capped to just 500 attendees so that nobody gets lost in the crowd. Speakers have time to meet and talk to you. No rushing people out of a session to get the next speaker going. Time to absorb what you see and talk it over with speakers and other attendees.

I will speak in two sessions:

Building a Datacenter Abstraction Layer with Virtual Machine Manager

The session delivers an overview about how you can build a Datacenter Abstraction Layer between your Fabric such as Storage, Network and Compute resources and your services. The session is focused on Fabric Management with System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager. Attendees will learn how to build an Datacenter Abstraction Layer between Fabric and Services with Virtual Machine Manager.

Disaster Recovery with Azure Site Recovery

The session shows you, how you can use Microsoft Disaster Recovery Technologies such as Hyper-V Replica, System Center Virtual Machine Manager and Azure Site Recovery to failover your Microsoft Cloud. It also shows the scenario how you can replicate virtual machines to Microsoft Azure. This includes knowledge about the different Disaster Recovery Solutions from Microsoft

The Midwest Management Summit will take place from November 10-12 in the Radisson Blu, Mall of America Minnesota, USA.

If you are interested to join the so called new MMS, checkout the Midwest Management Summit website.

A customer of mine had a issue when he tried to change properties of Virtual Machines in System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 which use shared VHDX, which were not created with VMM. The properties do he wanted to change had nothing to do with the Shared VHDX it self. He tried to set the availability set for these Virtual Machines.

The Error in SCVMM is the following:

Error (23317)The operation Change properties of virtual machine is not permitted on a virtual machine that has shared virtual hard disks.

Recommended ActionThe operation Change properties of virtual machine is not permitted on a virtual machine that has shared virtual hard disks.

Stanislav Zhelyazkov (Microsoft MVP) blogged about this in October 2013. The solution is pretty easy and is called PowerShell. Just do the modification but do not apply it. Use the script view in Virtual Machine Manager to get the code which would run behind the scene.

About

My Name is Thomas Maurer. Microsoft MVP for Hyper-V. Work as a Cloud Architect for itnetx gmbh, a consulting and engineering company located in Bern/Switzerland. I am focused on Microsoft Technologies, especially Microsoft Cloud Solutions based Microsoft System Center, Microsoft Virtualization and Windows Azure.